20 ms·
iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoI assume that everybody will now start implementing user-unique URLs to share like TikTok, instead of just tacking on parameters to a single canonical URL.
- wunderland 3y agoI wonder if Apple uses any data from the Shortcuts app when deciding what features to build next
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoYou mean Apple is tracking their users behavior? Impossible!
- nonameking2026 3y agoExplaine ?
- andelink 3y agoI also thought about this, because this is an exact shortcut I have already and use constantly, everywhere it is in my Share Sheet
- purpleblue 3y agoI wonder what companies will do now, probably embed the tracking information within the URL without using parameters, like dynamic URLs that are unique to a particular user/cookie?
- jalgos_eminator 3y agoI could see the writing on the wall. Offerup I think does this. If you click through an item in a search the URL has a UID in it. Then if you click on the seller and find the item from there, its an integer (which is likely a database index).
- williamcotton 3y agoCatchall subdomains?
- kitsunesoba 3y agoThere's not a whole lot that can be done to combat this, but I suppose Apple could do something like keep a database of known tracking URL patterns and when encountering such URLs, "unwrapping" them in an isolated background webview which is fully generic across machines and doesn't have the user's cookies or other data, which would limit the information gathered, and then finally passing the untracked URL back to the user's webview instance. EDIT: They could also do something similar to what they've done with Content Blocking Extensions, maybe call them "URL Cleaning Extensions", which allow third parties to maintain tracking URL pattern lists which Safari can then follow to do its unwrapping.
- Avamander 3y agoAlready ahead of you. They're already generating custom links with all the tracking parameters embedded. Tumblr, TikTok and Facebook have done it for a while now.
- ipsin 3y agoYeah, all you need is to encrypt the URL (which includes tracking query parameters), and then the URL you give out is the encrypted blob. When the web server gets a request, it can validate & decrypt, update any tracking values, and redirect to the real URL.
- altairprime 3y agoHistorical patterns with Mail.app on iOS suggests that Apple will simply code something that fetches all such links in order to collect a preview, whether or not the preview is ever shown to the user, just as they do with Mail.app images today when iCloud Private Relay is enabled. At which point the tracking value becomes less than zero, because it pollutes the core dataset attribution “a human saw this”.
- sergiotapia 3y agoTiktok does this. If you share anything on Tiktok, and someone clicks on the URL they get an alert "purpleblue shared this video with you!" and you can leak your private account to someone.
- graftak 3y agoThere is a TikTok setting to disable this. It still tracks you as the origin of the share action (naturally), but it’s hidden from the receiver.
- est31 3y agoI often remove tracking parameters from URLs and I notice that some services/websites return an error if you visit it without a tracking parameter. If a service does this, apple can't remove the tracking parameter from the URL any more.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThey're already doing it. I stopped clicking on links the second I realized this.
- dixie_land 3y ago> As a partial mitigation, Apple is enabling an alternative way for advertisers to measure campaign success, with Private Click Measurement ad attribution now available in Safari Private Browsing mode. Private Click Measurement allows advertisers to track ad campaign conversion metrics, but does not reveal individual user activity. While as a consumer I do objectively like the privacy measures Apple is adding, at end of the day they're simply consolidating all tracking power to themselves.
- X-Istence 3y agoPrivate Click Measurement is a standard that Apple has proposed and is working with the W3C to standardize, as well as working with other browser manufacturers: https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-measurement-pcm/ https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nicolaslem 3y agoAh yes, the AMP strategy.
- kergonath 3y agoExactly what people say they should have done with FaceTime, right? So, which one is it? Should they do it or should they not?
- candiodari 3y agoIf they were really working with standardization, they'd wait ...
- Someone 3y agoAre there any examples of using that approach in the history of web browsers? I thought that mostly boiled down to “IE/Netscape/Chrome/…” implements it, and if enough browsers implement it, we’ll document it as standard”
- partiallypro 3y agoHow does it determine what is a tracking parameter? You can often pass a string along in the URL because you're trying to call a function or pass simple data between pages.
- jackdh 3y agoExactly what I was thinking, I've had false positives from uBlock thinking anything with /tracking/ in the URL was telemetry (when it could for instance be tracking of postal goods). Unless they keep an up to date list of known tracking parameters I assume this will just become a cat and mouse game or advertisers will find other ways to obfuscate the tracking.
- ljm 3y agoIt’ll always be a cat and mouse game but I imagine that, even if they simply strip out utm_x parameters from the URL, there are enough websites out there that won’t update their Google analytics script to work around it.
- rjmunro 3y agoOr maybe it's a recover password link that you've been emailed, with an auth token.
- ryneandal 3y agoThe lowest-hanging fruit would be nuking any UTM-related tracking parameters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters). I'm sure the solution is sophisticated beyond simply handling these, though.
- GordonS 3y agoRight... but Google and Microsoft already let you customise the names of query parameters containing tracking information - I can call the Google Click ID parameter "dave" if I want to.
- ActualHacker 3y agoAnd the walls around the Spaceship are raised another few inches
- graypegg 3y agoMassively useful just because I do this manually already when sharing links. However, could become an arms race where we start putting correlation IDs in params named page= or video=.
- scrollaway 3y agoTikTok already does the latter iirc.
- tredre3 3y agoI believe you are correct. I don't use tiktok, but when someone shares a link with me the page says "XXX wanted you to see" and the url has no obvious query parameters so I can only assume they're bundling the video id with who shared it.
- anandnair 3y agoI don't think there is a foolproof way to tackle this.
- dinobones 3y agoYeah this is a very naive and somewhat potentially harmful measure. Think of all the old .asp and .php websites that basically route you to a page by just throwing a big old fat query string into the URL. The way this can be bypassed is: Before: mylink.mydomain?tracking_id=abc123 After: mylink.mydomain/home/abc123/ Yeah, it might wreck SEO. But if you're really trying to track users and see who clicked on your email or whatever, it's probably the case that you don't care about SEO in this specific case.
- ezfe 3y agoIt doesn't blanket-remove query parameters
- coldpie 3y agoThere is some kind of blanket-remove bug with bookmarks. Try bookmarking a URL with query parameters in Safari on iOS. I don't know if it happens with every URL, but with this one[1] specifically, it drops the query parameter from the bookmark. You have to go add it in manually by editing the bookmark afterwards. I wonder if it's motivated by the same kind of change as this article is about, or if it's a separate bug. (I haven't tested this recently, but it was true as of late last year.) [1] https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars?sort_by=created-descending https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars?sort_b...
- LukeLambert 3y agoThat's likely due to the page having a canonical URL meta tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars"/>
- dinobones 3y ago
- _5hxt 3y agoGood for PR, practically useless against tracking.
- pretext-1 3y agoIt’s not all or nothing. It does improve privacy.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoI'd assume it hinders it actually. It doesn't accomplish anything and you can tell what additional information about the customers device based on some parameters being stripped.
- ezekg 3y agoSo does this mean that something like example.com/password-reset?token_id=2h2GV4nhySERT9pJ may get the random token stripped? I don't understand how you can have a heuristic that doesn't break things.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoI use a Firefox extension for this same purpose. They maintain a large database of known tracker parameters and strip them. This means occasionally a new or unknown one slips through the cracks, but overall is very effective.
- agotterer 3y agoWon’t the tracking companies work around this by providing each account their own set of unique obfuscated tracking names and keywords that gets mapped back behind the scenes? Impossible to build a database that way.
- AviationAtom 3y agoThey already somewhat have. View the demo in normal mode at https://fingerprint.com/ https://fingerprint.com/ and then open it again in Incognito
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoProbably one day, yes. And then the cat and mouse game will continue.
- flangola7 3y agoNot one day. Facebook started this practice a year ago.
- throwaway290 3y agoOr simply generate a whole new URL with an UUID for every share.
- Caligatio 3y agoI use uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android with "Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool" added but am weirdly conflicted on this news. If a user opts to kneecap advertising, that is soundly within their rights. If a company does the same against another company's advertising as a part of their normal business, I feel like the user becomes a pawn in some corporate warfare strategy. Maybe it's because I think Apple is slowly building a parallel advertising ecosystem that is slightly less intrusive for users but massively more lucrative for themselves.
- wernercd 3y ago"I feel like the user becomes a pawn" A company that makes a 30% cut on apps using customers as a pawn to make a worse browser experience pushing people into using app store apps? Nothing is "less intrusive"... it's simply Apple making sure they get a larger cut of a larger market. It's also why they enforce a shitty Safari unto their customers instead of allowing real browser choice. They are the new MS bundling shitty software to harm competitors and limit consumer choice.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoGoogle also takes a 30% cut on apps. Microsoft takes 15% on Windows apps. Would that mean that Google and Microsoft are doing the same thing? And while Apple does require Google and Microsoft to use WebKit for their iOS browser apps, it's a rendering engine. And you can set Chrome/Edge as defaults on both iOS and macOS. Tell me how this limits real browser choice.
- cma 3y ago> Tell me how this limits real browser choice. How does Mozilla implement extensions on iOS >_<? It is much more than the rendering engine they are forced to use.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoChrome doesn't even let you install extensions on Android. And for Firefox on Android it's a buggy workaround that doesn't even work half the time. This isn't just an Apple thing.
- PaulHoule 3y ago... I built that into my RSS reader
- mrtksn 3y agoIsn't this a cat and a mouse game? The moment this actually start causing problems they will change how parameters work. Maybe the easiest would be to use a single encoded parameter which would be decoded on the server and Apple or anyone else won't be able to change a thing about it. This is a MITM attack where Apple plays the good guy(or control freak, depending on how you feel about it) but MITM attacks are nothing new.
- josephcsible 3y agoDidn't Facebook already start doing exactly that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100
- ezfe 3y agoApple is pushing PCM (private click measurement) as a middle safe ground, but nobody would adopt it if more invasive and accurate measures continued working. They're probably hoping that advertisers will retreat to PCM instead of continuing the cat and mouse game. PCM is an in-progress standard that, at a high level, allows measuring ad campaign success without tracking individual users. No such restrictions apply to query parameters, of course - so PCM is inherently more private.
- dazbradbury 3y agoAgreed. More simply couldn't any ad tracker just have a dynamic parameter name so it's impossible to distinguish between a parameter required to run the site and a parameter used for tracking? Or is this feature more advanced than just stripping known tracking parameter keys?
- Gigachad 3y agoDoesn't even have to be a parameter. Could just be a unique URL slug for every link. Backend DB will map the slugs to a user + content
- akavi 3y agoI believe Tiktok basically does that already.
- narrator 3y agoThe net effect of this Apple "privacy" stuff is to make it very hard for small niche businesses with a limited budget to advertise effectively. There were tons of startup CPG brands like Dollar Shave Club that popped up during the great Facebook Ad banaza of the mid 2010s when tracking worked. This privacy crusade has just essentially cemented the big brands who can afford to do poorly targeted ad campaigns like TV advertising.
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoHonestly, I don't want any company to track me, neither big nor small.
- hospitalJail 3y agoThis is barely privacy related, its more like an anti-referal system.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoWhatever. I don't want them tracking me for any reason. If that kills a bunch of startups so be it.
- bamfly 3y agoThey can advertise without tracking people. Maybe on websites the readers of which are a good fit for their products. One wonders how any product launched or small business survived prior to the current millennium.
- sensanaty 3y agoIf your business dies because you can't track every micrometer of my mouse movements, then I'm one happy camper personally, good riddance.
- villgax 3y agoWon't work with unique links like reddit or Instagram for content. Maybe just the share ID or device params might go
- lapcat 3y agoIn my testing, the tracking parameter removal in Safari 17 seems very limited. It'll be interesting to see if this turns up in the WebKit open source, to see how it's implemented.
- sir_brickalot 3y agoQuestion: When I click in my Gmail android app on a link from a received E-Mail, the opened Firefox browser opens a google domain for a second and only after that the domain from the link opens... any idea what that is? Tracking?
- jeffbee 3y agoGoogle bounces all URLs through a redirector which strips referrer information and also allows them to warn about malware sites that were identified after the message itself was classified and delivered.
- sir_brickalot 3y agoI would like to test that but when clicking different links I get mixed results. The URLs get modified alright but a lot of referrer info seems to not get removed. I guess its just Google collecting one more metric.
- Szpadel 3y agoi think this is to remove real referer url from header, as this behavior is also present when you use web version of Gmail. but with that solution tracking is also possible
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xahrepap 3y agoIt's for security. Checking against a list of banned URLs, etc. When you have user-submitted content, protecting your users from bad URLs is important. Also, I'm sure they're doing plenty of click tracking too :)
- cj 3y agoGoogle Ads sent an email out to advertisers (a few days ago I think) introducing their workaround. Normally clicks have a "gclid" query param. Google is introducing 2 new query params to somehow attribute clicks using modeling + machine learning (somehow). Edit: here's a detailed description of how Google is attempting to track conversions using machine learning. I have no idea how this could possibly work without some kind of fingerprinting or user profiling or IP address. Almost feels like "modeled conversions" powered by ML is a way to do fingerprinting without explicitly having an algorithm that blatantly uses fingerprinting. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10710245?sjid=8503423528289259869-NA https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10710245?sjid=85... Edit 2: The new query params are "gbraid" and "wbraid". Googling those turns up more details.
- suavesito 3y agoIt is not a work around in the sense that they will be able to track you, they won't. What Google tells them that if they use Analytics 4, they can use modelling to give attribution of convertion. In this case, attribution means not fingerprinting but percentage of people that was converted thanks to Ads. For other analytic engines they set the fields as 'not set'. They day that in their models they aggregate data as geo, IP, and others and they won't give the fingerprinting data. The only problem is that they don't give details on the privacy preservation of their ML models. This means that if they fuck it up and give to much information, someone could try to reverse the aggregation (like doing a deconvolution) and do some fingerprinting.
- adrr 3y agoEasy work around is encrypt the data into the path decode the data server side and do a server to server beacon call. no ad blocker technique is going to be able to block it. apple is just making the industry step through more hoops. all the beacon calls are going to server to server before this.
- andy_xor_andrew 3y agoMy favorite part about this is how it basically forces services to accept this as a functional scenario. If it were UBlock Origin doing this, sites could just say "Sorry, we don't support this, your addin is breaking everything, please turn it off." But when Apple does something, there's no room for conversation. Sites can't say "Sorry, we don't work on iPhones." For better or worse, what Apple decides becomes acceptable. In this case for better.
- reaperducer 3y agoBut when Apple does something, there's no room for conversation. Sites can't say "Sorry, we don't work on iPhones." Absolutely. There was no shortage of Windows-centric corporate IT departments that swore that they'd never support Apple products. Then iPhones started showing up in boardrooms, and they quickly changed their tune. I brought my iPhone to work shortly after launch and showed it to curious coworkers. The head of IT for that particular multinational corp said it was garbage and would never be allowed on his network. "Apple is crapple" was his favorite phrase. A few months later he got to peddle his anti-Apple mantra on the unemployment line.
- bilbo0s 3y agoIn fairness to the people who fired him, fanboy-ism has no place in the dispassionate decision making process of a professional. You have to have people around who are making decisions based on realities and not mantras or you're going to lose money. If he wants a job where fanboy-ism can be helpful in climbing the ladder, he should try politics or something like that. Where all the money on the line belongs to other people. So no one really works to protect any of it.
- vxNsr 3y agoWow, are you seriously crowing about someone getting fired for not liking a particular company?
- interpol_p 3y agoWe shouldn’t crow about people being fired. But I’ve had that anti-Apple attitude leveraged at me in _so many meetings_. Having to smile and be polite to the face of people who keep referring to your choice of hardware as “fisher price” or “a toy” or “for sheep” is tiring and infuriating. I’m an engineer, and I made my decision with as much technical and design knowledge as anyone else In my experience it’s also extremely one sided. I work with Windows, Android and Apple colleagues and the amount of times I hear “Xcode is crap haha”, “How can they live with such a shitty OS” etc. makes me wonder if all this is rooted in deep insecurity or something? Some Windows-centric people in senior management places I have worked will use me taking my iPhone out of my pocket as an opportunity to criticise the platform, my choice, and so on I’m sure that some Apple users are quick to do the same, but in my experience they just tend to get on with their lives
- hospitalJail 3y agoSounds great, I already use an addon to do this, but its nice to fight against marketing whenever we can. Good to have more users doing this. The only negative I can see, is that this might long-term reduce functionality. I personally have a bad habit of passing data through URLs out of laziness/practicality. Real quick, could you not download an addon that did this before? If you could, this seems potentially malicious, need to keep everyone on the App store and hurt the web.
- cush 3y ago> this might long-term reduce functionality... passing data through URLs Are you somehow passing the data within the tracking params? Don't worry, Apple isn't going to remove all QSPs. That would break the internet.
- spogbiper 3y agoYour addon for this works because it's not widespread enough for the marketers to implement a workaround. Apple just changed that, so now the marketers will find a new way and your addon won't be effective.
- activiation 3y agoDo they block Google from tracking which search results you click on? Google changes search results link on-click to make sure they know where you go... Just right-click on a link and then hover it to see where it really points to
- dorianmariefr 3y agoDoesn't work for me, I'm on Chrome, no adblockers (disabled uBlock), maybe it's because I said no to tracking
- activiation 3y agoI don't get your comment
- indymike 3y agoGet ready for everything to be a redirect. mysite.com/aZdi instead of mysite.com/invitation/?uid=1234
- nwienert 3y agoIn the end most of these have to end up at some sort of public URL. Only truly closed platforms like FB could really work around this, but anything that ultimately has a public URL will be pretty easy to find.
- indymike 3y agoNot really, any website can implement a url scheme that makes url params unneeded. You see this all the time with SEO friendly stuff where mysite.com/cool-product/details is displaying the same thing that mysite.com/product/?product_id=124&view=detail It's extra work, but it's not hard.
- nwienert 3y agoi think you missed my point though, even with that it still stands
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoWell Safari could remove the parameters on the fly before performing the redirect I guess?
- indymike 3y agoMaybe. For the past few years I've had the pattern of making is so we can permalinks that carry all the parameters in the database... so if you click on https://mysite.com/uDFOD https://mysite.com/uDFOD it might display the same thing that https://mysite.com/products/really-cool-product/?lotsa=parameters&on=this+url&because=reasons&totally_blatant_user_id=someuser https://mysite.com/products/really-cool-product/?lotsa=param... whould, but there is nothing in the url that needs to be displayed. If your web app is hosting the redirect, you can just skip to C and respond with the correct body to the redirect url.
- tibbon 3y agoGood. I wish the internet would go the way of the Gemini Project and, by default have privacy-centric behavior. I'm tried to every company thinking I want to be tracked; I do not. I want simple services that do the thing I ask them to do and no more.
- EGreg 3y agoWait what?? So now if there is a link to, say, mysite.com/f/ajdheke and the last part is different for each user, and I choose to send this link to a friend, then the friend will get mysite.com/f ? Breaking the site? Apple is going too far with this. Cookies is one thing, but how are people supposed to confirm email addresses now, copypaste a code?
- pantulis 3y agoWill it remove Amazon referral trackers? That could destroy a publishing sub-industry in one fell swoop.
- hooverd 3y agoIs there a way to accomplish this on Android?
- err4nt 3y agoThe hyperlink is the building block of the web - without links there is no web. Please just leave links alone. I don't particularly enjoy tracking any more than the next person, but don't automatically alter links people may be intentionally trying to access. I hope this is a feature that's disabled by default in the future even if it's offered for people to turn on and off any time.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoHave you seen current applications like Reddit and YouTube? They all have their own 'share' menus which essentially bypass any protections put in place by iOS.
- pvo50555 3y ago[dead]
- Maxburn 3y agoAll the little things like this that keep getting added are why I switched back to iphone.
- detrites 3y agoReframed: "iOS 17 arbitrarily modifies links you click on".
- _2d30 3y agoAbsolutely wild to me that anyone is in favor of this for exactly this reason. If a user chooses to do this, more power to them. If my OS does this by default, it's an insane invasion of my use.
- Gigachad 3y agoiOS is not Gentoo. Users pick iPhones specifically _because_ they do work for you rather than asking you to configure things.
- nofunsir 3y agoGood. Something had to be done. You (marketing) guys have gone too far. My genuine opinion: All advertising is evil, with one singular exception: Shoe ads for shoes inside your own shoe store. All tracking is evil, with one exception: a simple integer counter that counts how many people enter your store. And, no, I don’t mean an integer for every possible metric, justifying it by claiming each particular metric is like a unique store counter. Everything else, and I do mean everything, is your responsibility to count on the back end. “I put out 7 shoes and only sold 1. Try something else.” Anything more than this is simply greed and laziness.
- ddxv 3y agoI see advertisements as payment for information, and people should have rights to disseminate information. If I want to pay for information to be shown to users, that should be my right. I prefer advertisements because they can be obvious and labeled as such. Apple's changes here are moves by one advertising company (Apple) to control the flow of other advertising companies' information. It's a monopolistic move that gives them an unfair advantage in advertising, just like their SKAN solution did in mobile, leading to a huge increase in advertising revenue for Apple. Consumer's are told by Apple that this is to 'protect their privacy' when in fact, it does not protect privacy. This is a targeted move by Apple to consolidate their position in the advertising ecosystem.
- hamhamed 3y agowe work in the affiliate business and this has the potential to completely desotry the business model. Many of our partners rely on affiliate money to make ends meet, it is what powers most content creators. Safari is planning to use ML to detect click_id type of query parameters and strip that from URLs. That's just poor execution and business destroying. PCM restrictions are horrible too.. we have to design the link so it stays within safari's specs: > With an ad-click, an 8-bit ID can be transmitted (a number between 0 and 255, i.e. 256 possible values / campaigns) - per domain > For a conversion, a 4-bit ID is transmitted (a number between 00 and 15, i.e. 16 different types of conversion) - per domain Not to mention Chrome and Firefox has other ideas, each different on how their PCM will be integrated. Other than the mega corps, noone is benefitting from this privacy enhancement. Just more work to adapt.
- moneywoes 3y agoIs affiliate just url parameters? Is there no other way to measure?
- bombcar 3y agoCan't the tracking information just be stuck in the actual URL itself? Even in the domain name? So instead of amazon.de/product?affilate=hamhamed it would be something like hamhamed.amazon.de/product? And if that won't work, just encode the entire url as amazon.de/2ec1a277-0c96-40d3-8fe1-e418fd82986d
- polyomino 3y agoCacheing becomes more challenging, but you could theoretically decode the scheme at the cdn
- dorianmariefr 3y agoStack Overflow has links with user id, I think this will continue to work https://stackoverflow.com/a/70506056/12544391 https://stackoverflow.com/a/70506056/12544391
- 3y ago
- acchow 3y agoToo bad tiktok generates URLs not only from which content is being linked to, but also the user generating the link. And once the industry realized that users don't revolt at this privacy invasion, it has been spreading.
- jonas-w 3y agoThats why I instantly put these links into a service like https://unshorten.me/ https://unshorten.me/ and then send/open them. I use urlchecker [0] for this on my phone and have it set as my" browser" that way, every link i click on, I see a popup with the link and with one or two button presses I can remove the tracking parameters and/or unshorten it and then open it. Works like a charm. May be to much friction for some, but I like it. [0] https://www.f-droid.org/de/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/ https://www.f-droid.org/de/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecke...
- yborg 3y agoI don't think this will work on those TikTok links though?
- jonas-w 3y agoDon't use TikTok, so can't say, but never had an Issue with these types of tracking links.
- npteljes 3y agoThis works only if they implement it via HTTP redirect. If the backend does the tracking and then just loads the content, then the client is none the wiser.
- betimsl 3y agoApple is killing it at the moment. Just wow and I hope they don't take away good features in the future.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoA lot of the conversation here seems to be that you can't trust Apple, or that Apple is doing something user hostile. I don't get it. What's the alternative? Most people with a phone are going to be using iOS or Android. Those are the two options. Apple has the chance to improve data privacy, and they've done it. Android (essentially, Google) is certainly _not_ going to take such action. Apple could always use this to their advantage, or double-back on it. Who cares? They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.
- kergonath 3y ago> I don't get it. It’s Apple. There is nothing else to understand. Just because of who they are, some people will claim it will change the world and some people will claim it’s bullshit or not working or evil. There are many more of the latter and they are quite annoying, but the best that can be done is ignore them. > They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter. Some people cannot seem to understand that a company whose interests align with those of the consumers, however imperfectly, is better than a company whose policy relies only on ideology. Then you have the contrarians who will claim that they are lying and black is white anyway.
- paul_grisham 3y agoApple keeps focusing the privacy discussion on things like 3rd party trackers, since this doesn't affect their business model in any way but gives them good PR. They do nothing against the more serious issue of government surveillance, they even let the government run their iCloud servers in China. Their interests align with consumers and they align with governments even more.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think it’s completely healthy to remain skeptical of a massive corporation. But that doesn’t mean we have to be tribal about it. I dunno. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just intellectually less exhausting to “black and whiteify” everything rather than explore the nuances of a corporation doing stuff that we sometimes benefit from. We should remain skeptical and scrutinize and shape their actions through consumer feedback.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoCan it cause issues with urls like /?p=:uuid? What logic are they using for stripping? Or invite links with tokens?
- nottorp 3y agoSo can I configure Safari to do this all the time, not only in private browsing? And especially when I copy links out of it to share with people.
- aspyct 3y agoOh, that would explain why some of my users suddenly can't access URLs that worked forever. I send those URLs through facebook messenger, which add its 'fbclickid' nonsense to them. I don't care for that tracking information, however it seems the URL becomes malformed after iOS "cleans" it, resulting in a redirect loop on my server. When was iOS 17 released? EDIT: Oh, nevermind, it's not released yet. Must be something else then... I blame facebook
- poglet 3y agoIt was released 2 days ago in a public beta.
- paulddraper 3y agoSo.....now everyone encodes tracking parameters in the URL path? Yay!
- tinus_hn 3y agoI hope the end result is not people encrypting the path and parameters so you can’t manipulate it anymore.
- tyingq 3y agoInteresting, as they have to be using some sort of blacklist, like "fbclid" and so on. I'm curious if there will be an escalation cat-and-mouse thing with less easily identifiable params, rotating names, etc.
- dietr1ch 3y agoIt's kinda silly, it'll end up in having opaque targeted links, but at least you won't be able to tag external links that easily.
- justinator 3y agoThe affiliate program I use also allows you to create affiliate links with a link shortener.
- ilyt 3y agoThat's gonna be fun to debug when it will hit inevitable false positive
- rstephenson2 3y agoHas anyone verified this (the Mail.app) part themselves, or is the blog post just going off of Apple's press release? The press release: > Link Tracking Protection in Messages, Mail, and Safari Private Browsing > "Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing." Note that it says "links _users_ share". That part seems unnecessary if it's _all_ links in emails. I think it points to this feature being more about protecting a user from inadvertently forwarding their email to someone else, while not realizing it has personal identifiers in the links? Preventing others from unsubscribing them, or even auto-logging-in etc. Though, I personally haven't seen iOS17 remove any query params from emails at all, maybe will have to wait for the next beta to find out.
- ahahahahah 3y agoI am so happy that apple is inspecting all the links that i click on and rewriting to serve their own purposes. As a user this makes me so happy.
- fomine3 3y agoWhat's finally happening is the death of permalink, like TikTok. They generate unique URL for every share.
- smcleod 3y agoSay what you will about Apple but I'm really thankful of the stance they've taken on user privacy over the last 5+ years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- de6u99er 3y agoI'm using the ClearURL browser extension for that. It's also a available on Firefox Mobile. Unfortunately some apps are making it harder to open links directly in Firefix. E.g. Reddit's app has removed the possibility to open links in an external browser.
- djtango 3y agoAs much as I'm pro privacy how much of this is just to push people onto apps...
- gloosx 3y ago>It detects user-identifiable tracking parameters in link URLs, and automatically removes them. Wow, another heuristics software by Apple that automatically does something I didn't ask for? Is there a chance it removes a parameter from the link which renders the functionality broken? On the other hand, could advertisers just use random hashes without labeling them as the tracking param to avoid this? Apple is famous for producing bad software, I hope their programming would automatically interfere with as less things as possible.
- jesterson 3y agoWhy is i this downvoted? it's a legitimate concern. Big corporation suddenly decides to arbitrarily change links. Everyone happy? Unbelievable
- gloosx 3y agoyeah it is wild that it is an unpopular opinion, perhaps my tone was a bit aggressive here towards Apple – but after all these years using their software – i detest most of it, and especially where they want to intervent my content for whatever cause.
- deathlight 3y agoToo little too late; who could even begin to believe?
- JaceLightning 3y agoHow will websites know if users are using them if they can't collect data?
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoThis is a welcome change but I don't believe it prevents links from being copied with the tracking url (especially from Apps like instagram). I made an iOS extension that supports this and allows you to add your own filters. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clean-share/id6448807061 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clean-share/id6448807061
- wildpeaks 3y agoQuestion is, how are they going to identify tracking parameters in links ? They can't just blanket remove all GET parameters (because it would break legitimate non-tracking links), plus advertisers could use subpaths instead of GET params for writing the tracking data. Therefore I suspect it's only going to be arms race between a blacklisted list of GET params and advertisers changing up the variable names to escape it, making it unsafe to use any GET param at all because you can't be sure a link that works today will still work tomorrow if they changed their list of banned properties.
- rednerrus 3y agoThis would be a good thread to understand what every posters affiliation it.